Nangang Depot Public House paving the way for circular economy

Because buildings last for years and depend on complicated supply chains and diverse materials, builders have struggled to adopt circular economic principles that reduce the extraction of virgin materials and cut carbon emissions that cause climate change.

Now, however, they are under pressure to change. “Rising prices, increased volatility in commodity markets, and negative externalities… have spurred global leaders to reconsider using materials and energy,” wrote National Taiwan University and other researchers who published their research on June 12 in SSRN, a service that features research that has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Entitled “An Empirical Study of Implementing the Circular Economy in a Social Housing Project in Taiwan Using the Resolve Framework,” the co-authors’ paper details how the Nangang Depot Public House in Taipei is using the ReSOLVE framework to become the first public housing project in Taiwan to advance circularity. 

Developed by the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the ReSOLVE framework stands for regenerating, sharing, optimizing, looping, virtualizing, and exchanging materials to recycle and reuse products.

The scholars identify the Nangang Depot Public House’s challenges and successes in fostering circular economies and suggest augmenting the ReSOLVE framework as a roadmap for other developments. They believe builders must consider systems, sites, structures, skin, services, space, and stuff – which they label as 7S – to better implement the ReSOLVE system for large construction projects.

Nangang Depot Public House used rainwater tanks, shared transportation systems, a compact site plan, reusing older buildings in the depot area, and other features to address the researcher’s 7S-ReSOLVE framework. ce/jd